The GAVI Alliance, which has been hosted by UNICEF since it was launched in 2000, has become an independent international institution - the first organisation to receive such recognition under the new Swiss Host State Act.

The GAVI Alliance partners, the World Bank, WHO and UNICEF, and five national governments and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation formally kick-off the first-ever Advance Market Commitment (AMC) designed to accelerate access to vaccines against pneumococcal disease.

The World Health Organization has recommended that rotavirus vaccination be included in all national immunization programmes in order to provide protection against a virus that is responsible for more than 500,000 diarrhoeal deaths and two million hospitalisations annually among children.

The United States will donate $75 million to the GAVI Alliance’s immunisation initiative to protect children in the world’s poorest countries with new and under-used vaccines – its largest annual contribution to date.

GAVI has appointed Australian development expert Helen Evans as its first Deputy Chief Executive Officer. Ms. Evans will join GAVI in June after serving for the past four years as Deputy Executive Director at the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm) board chairman Alan Gillespie tells participants at a meeting on innovative financing in Geneva that there is a strong demand among individual and institutional investors for ethical investments.